A number of techniques are known to those of skill in the art for delivering video content to users. Providers of video content maintain the video content in one or more data stores and maintain structured information that describes the video content. Providers of video content are limited, however, in that each provider allows users to search only over a given provider's library of items of video content, without any indication of when items unavailable in a given provider's library are available from an alternative source. For example, users at the Cinemanow.com web site are unable to view video content available at Movielink.com, and vice versa. Additionally, video content providers do not allow users to locate freely available items of video content available on the Internet, either alone or in conjunction with structured information that providers of video content make available for items of video content that they host.
In addition to video content made available for purchase or download from commercial providers of audio content, users may download video files from servers connected to the Internet. For example, a user may navigate to a given web site that is hosting video content and select a given item of video content for download to a local data store for playback. Although the video content and related information made available on servers connected to a network such as the Internet is unstructured, users may employ general search engines, such as Yahoo! Search, to perform keyword searches over content that the search engine indexes to identify items of video content. The search engine returns a result set comprising one or more links to files that contain the one or more keywords in the user search, which may, but not necessarily, include links to items of video content. Using a search engine in this manner, however, fails to search across the universe of structured information regarding items of video content that providers of video content maintain. Furthermore, there is no targeting of the result set specifically to items of video content and related information.
In order to overcome these and other shortcomings and problems associated with existing apparatuses and techniques for searching for and retrieving video content, embodiments of the present invention provide improved systems and methods for indexing and searching video content.